Star Force: Penance (SF49) by Aer-ki Jyr Read Free Book Online Page A

moving down into the atmosphere, passing the warship Paul had
positioned there and moving towards the surface to engage the drones that had
slipped by them.

 
    Morgan’s neo was all but trash, having lost her
shields more times than she could count and now down 3 emitters, leaving her
left leg permanently exposed. Her left mauler was gone, with the sword blade in
that arm locked into deployed mode. She could still use it, but couldn’t
retract it, meaning her hand in that arm was now useless for the blade stuck
out from underneath the wrist.
    Her armor had damage everywhere, but none had gotten
below 25% in any spots, though there was a deep cut in her back that was
registering at 34% thickness. She’d gotten that damage running away from a
group of tanks that otherwise would have killed her, given that there had been
some 22 of them that she’d felt like trimming down to 20. Now that kind of
seemed like a bad move, but it had provided a distraction for two trios of
other neos to take down some smaller groups, all the while wading through the
suffocating, self-sacrificing infantry that was constantly trying to slow them
down.
    Morgan had stepped on more of them than she cared to
remember, not liking to kill enemies that way but they were giving her no
choice. Even one of the hoths had taken a leg hit that made it unable to walk,
but it was still standing and fighting…forcing her and the others to change
their tactics to fight around it or leave it behind. She’d chosen the later,
pushing forward with the still working one while leaving a pair of madcats
behind to assist the hoth with the infantry that kept trying to overwhelm it.
    Morgan hadn’t had time to think about much else, let
alone look at her battlemap, which meant it was a huge surprise and relief when
the sun was suddenly blotted out by a rectangular cloud that started firing
down into the tank formations with mauler blasts that literally melted them on
explosive contact.
    It wasn’t until a bright torch beam swept across the
infantry hoards that she realized it was coming from a warship overhead…with
her amending that sentiment as she checked the battlemap and saw multiple
drones coming down from orbit and beginning to annihilate the enemy troops. She
wondered how in the hell Paul had managed that with the enemy fleet sitting up
there…which was when she also saw on the battlemap that they were coming down
into the atmosphere by the hundreds.
    “Oh shit, Paul,” she whisper swore. “You better know
what you’re doing.”

 
    5

 
 
    One of the remote pilots stationed on the planet,
situated in a city that was currently under attack, was flying one of the
drones sent to that location. It was odd for her to see where she was from
above, not to mention he hoard of enemies outside and now in, given that the
city wall had just been breached. Her corvette was descending rapidly through
the atmosphere, now only a handful of kilometers in altitude as she and the
rest of the fleet had been given orders to engage the enemy ground forces
directly.
    That was an unusual order, but one that they’d trained
for extensively…and given the current situation one that she agreed with
wholeheartedly. There were Knights guarding their building in order to keep the
enemy from cutting off their control of the drones, and given dire enough
circumstances they would tell them when to evacuate, so Kaleigh didn’t have to
worry about looking over her shoulder, but she was apprehensive and being able
to contribute to her own defense was immensely helpful. That way she could
actually do something rather than sit and wait to be shot or blown up.
    “Assuming direct control,” a deep, dark voice said
into her earpiece and suddenly she no longer had helm control of the corvette.
In fact she wasn’t linked to it at all, now pushed into a waiting cue to be
placed somewhere else within the fleet remote systems.
    “What the hell?” she asked, feeling like the